Super Fly

Curtis Mayfield scores a Harlem hustler’s exit fantasy

Youngblood Priest wants one more deal and then a life that does not require the deal. Gordon Parks Jr.’s Super Fly, released in the summer of 1972, follows Ron O’Neal through Harlem in a long coat and a Cadillac that the camera treats as part of the character. The plot is the old exit fantasy: one score, then out. What makes the film stick is not the exit fantasy on its own. It is the gap between the pictures, which enjoy the clothes and the car, and Curtis Mayfield’s songs, which do not celebrate them.

Mayfield wrote Little Child Runnin’ Wild, Pusherman, Freddie’s Dead and Superfly as if he had been hired for another film, one in which the coat does not win. The bass line warns more than it celebrates. It does not cheer the deal along. Freddie’s Dead is a funeral set to a tempo you can dance to. A dance tempo under a funeral is the move the score is remembered for. The soundtrack album arrived with the film and, for many listeners, outlived the plot. You can know Priest’s face from a poster and still have learned the story from the record, where the pusher is not a hero and the child in the title is not a prop.

Parks Jr., son of the photographer and filmmaker Gordon Parks, shoots the neighborhood as a place where style is one way of getting through the day. Sheila Frazier, Carl Lee, the street itself: nobody is asked to deliver a slogan. That refusal angered people who wanted Black cinema to be a classroom. Junius Griffin of the Hollywood NAACP heard a diet of pimps and pushers and said so in public. He was naming a real danger. He was also missing the argument Mayfield had already put on tape. The film glamorizes a man trying to leave. The songs describe what leaving costs, and who pays when they are not in the Cadillac.